


Minor Grievances In Major Chord

by kattastic99



Series: In Death Are You Redeemed [8]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Anti-Faunus Racism (RWBY), Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Gun Violence, Just one and it's fresh but still, References to police brutality and brutal anti riot measures, Worker's Rights, i'm really bad at tagging things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:53:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28818093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattastic99/pseuds/kattastic99
Summary: Adam is making his way through Solitas on his way to Mantle, and he stops by a small mining town to try and teach its residents the power of unionizing, and to harass the foreman into behaving. It doesn't end well.
Series: In Death Are You Redeemed [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993420
Kudos: 4





	Minor Grievances In Major Chord

**Author's Note:**

> Woops, this took me way too fucking long! Uh, yeah I dunno I'm pretty sure my depression is flaring way the hell up. I just feel bad! Like, almost all the time! And not even like in a negative way I'm just tired and empty and, y'know, other extremely obvious symptoms of depression that I failed to recognize for too long. I hope this was worth the wait, though! This one takes place even earlier than the previous one, and the next two are likewise going to be further and further in the past. We'll pick up on current events eventually, I promise.

It wasn’t snowing, but here on lovely old Solitas all you needed was some wind and you’d be buried in snow regardless. Ah, tundras; truly the second worst biome on all of Remnant, close behind Menagerie’s deserts. Vacuo was an even closer third as far as Adam was concerned.

The town didn’t look like much compared to any of the major cities of the world, but for an outlying settlement in a kingdom it was pretty substantial; it had huge defensive walls and even an automated air defense system in the form of huge turrets dotted along the top of the walls. It was at least a full square mile large, maybe closer to two, although there was no way of telling how much of that was the surface of the mining complex. 

There were no guards stationed at the gate set into that massive wall, but Adam knew there didn’t have to be; grimm sensors were accurate and easy to integrate into automated security systems, even this far out into the wastes of Solitas. His extremely stolen Atlas-issued hoverbike made nary a sound as he drove through the gate and into the town square, but it was evident pretty quick that he could have come screaming through the front door on a derailed train covered in fireworks and nobody would have noticed; the town square was completely empty, and if he couldn’t see lights on in a lot of buildings he might have thought the town was completely abandoned. 

Adam sighed and got off his bike. He didn’t even bother to park it, he doubted anyone would care. Or  _ notice. _ He’d been places like this before; towns that weren’t abandoned but might as well have been for all the joy you’d find in them. This wasn’t a place people lived so much as a place you could find people existing, going through the motions while they still could and numbly scraping what little enjoyment out of their lives that they could in the privacy of their own thoughts. Because their own thoughts was the only place that they  _ had _ . 

Didn’t take him long to find a store, since this was still the town square and all. Adam didn’t really know what to expect when he pulled open the door and stepped inside, but what he got was a teenager asleep at the counter of one of the saddest gift shops he’d ever seen; everything seemed to be SDC brand and layered in dust. There wasn’t even a bell on the door. 

“Hello?” Adam croaked out and tried not to wince; his lungs still ached, especially in this dry, cold wind, but he hadn’t expected his voice to sound so rough. Then again, wasn’t like he’d had much reason to use it in the past week of lonely travel through the tundras. 

The teenager sat up slowly and fixed Adam with a glare that would have made him step back if he hadn’t been murdered recently and lost the fear of death. “Yeah?” they bit out as if Adam had just killed their family and had the audacity to show his face again. They had the rectangular pupils of a goat, so Adam doubted he’d killed their family, but it was hard to be sure. 

“This is a mining town, yeah?” Adam asked gruffly. 

The clerk sat up more, bitterness leaking into their voice. “Yeah. Why, who the hell are you?” 

After a rough and audibly painful coughing fit into his glove, Adam croaked out “Doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m here to fix things, by force if necessary. Where’s the foreman?” 

The teen snorted, and Adam was all too familiar with the emotions he could see in their face; in worse, or better, days he would have considered recruiting them for the White Fang. “I don’t know what exactly you think you can do, but fuck it; the foreman should be in his office. Head down the main street and don’t take any turns, you’ll hit the gates to the complex eventually. You head in and you’ll see his office right away, it’s a bright green little building.” They rolled their eyes and looked as if they were trying to reign in the desire to spit. “Gods forbid his office be in any of the buildings we already had.”

They said something else, but Adam couldn’t hear them because he’d already turned and headed out the door. The wind was biting but Adam’s aura dealt with the worst of it, kept it from cutting into his skin like knives. He remembered what this wind felt like without an aura to protect you, it was one of the biggest selling points the SDC gave their workers for living inside the upper levels of the mines they were dying in; we can’t afford to house you all, but we’re happy to give you protected places to live, free of the wind and the grimm! Just make sure you keep working yourself to the bone, or we’ll kick you out to die. 

It was a sad fact that most people chose the slower death over the quicker, because the SDC took so long to kill you that you could pretend you’d be fine. Delusions of safety simply had a better marketing team than the truth. 

Adam’s fingers  _ itched _ to grab the sheath of his new sword as he approached the wrought iron gates of the mining complex. He’d not seen a single person out in the streets, and part of it was surely the wind but he knew damn well that wasn’t all of it. The gates weren’t just open, they looked to be long since rusted into place that way; in Solitas, the mines  _ never _ closed. 

Aside from the promised eyesore of an office, the complex was hauntingly familiar to Adam, and it made his skin itch. Some areas more than others. This wasn’t the town he’d been born to, these weren’t the mines he’d toiled in, this was not the place Adam would not return to. But it looked a  _ lot _ like it thanks to standard mining practices and mass produced building plans. Why design a complex for every town when the first design works fine? 

He was disappointed when the door to the foreman’s office was unlocked, because he’d really wanted an excuse to kick it the hell down. Adam settled for slamming it open hard enough that he had to use his shoulder to keep it from bouncing back into him. This display ended up being a complete and total waste, however, because he had a secretary. 

At least the young man with a bushy squirrel tail manning the desk was scared by Adam’s violent entrance. Gods, this place was depressing top to bottom. “C-can I h-h-help you?” the secretary stammered out. Even through his wooden bull mask, Adam’s glare made the guy step back. 

“I’m here to help  _ you, _ actually,” Adam said as he gave the secretary a side-eyed glance the man had no hope of seeing. “Foreman in?” The second he saw the guy glance nervously at the office door, Adam knew all he needed to and headed over. Internally, he was glad the secretary didn’t try to stop him; externally, Adam didn’t give him a second thought as he barged on in. 

In stark contrast to the plain exterior and the empty waiting room, the foreman’s office was decked out in the style of modernism and minimalism; sleek black tiled floor, sterile white furniture, cold steel shelves with colorless knick-nacks of indiscernible shape and function; it was like every other SDC office in the world. The only hint of individualism was the bouquet of plastic flowers in an empty vase on the desk, behind which sat the foreman Adam was here to see. 

“I’m here to file some worker’s grievances,” Adam snarled as he drew his sword. It wasn’t as difficult to shift his style as he thought it would be, but there was still a bit of a learning curve when it came to his instincts; Euphrates and its sheathe weren’t the same as Wilt and Blush, which required him to shift away from his habit of constant sheathing and drawing and towards a style that focused more on keeping the pressure on his opponent. Not that this was going to be a fight, of course, but having the gleaming cobalt blade hovering so threateningly in the air as he held it almost nonchalantly was a  _ fantastic _ conversational motivator. 

The disgustingly fancy gun Adam was expecting, the dead-center shot to his chest he was not. “Cute,” the foreman said. He was dressed well in a suit and tie, and of course he was human, but he held himself more like a fighter than an executive. It made sense, unfortunately; the SDC wasn’t run by morons, and it was easier to train a foreman to ‘defend himself’ than it was to keep a large staff of ‘guards’ at every mine. Cut out the middle man, even in violent oppression. However, for all his so called experience, he clearly wasn’t expecting Adam’s aura to barely even flicker when it absorbed the shot. 

Then he did another thing Adam wasn’t expecting, and he leaned to the side a bit and tapped at the keyboard of his stupidly expensive looking computer. “The AKs will be here in two minutes.” The bastard even looked smug about it. “They’re not the clunky old models either, this is the shiny new generation. Ever since the SDC lost an entire quarter’s worth of dust to a single train robbery, they’ve upped security world-wide.” 

“Not the brightest move, calling your entire security force here at once,” Adam said hoarsely. “Especially with how long it’ll take for headquarters to send you the replacements.” The red portions of his hair lit up like a neon sign as he channeled his semblance and darted forwards impossibly fast. That godsawful gun was torn out of the man’s hand before he could blink, and there was a very satisfying crunch when Adam backhanded him in the face so hard he flew backwards into the wall. With any luck that was his nose breaking. 

When he marched out of the office, the secretary was actually huddling underneath his desk. Adam felt bad for him, honestly, so he paused a foot in front of the door outside and turned. “You have nothing to fear, you know,” he said as softly as he could manage. “Not from me, and not from him. When you act in unison, this town can withstand so much more than you could ever dream.” Adam cut himself off there, though; that was a speech he had to give to the entire town, not a single terrified young man hiding under a desk. 

The wind was even worse when he stepped back outside, casting his eye around to try and see where the AKs would come from. If it was going to take two minutes, they were probably stored somewhere in the complex itself. 

Adam heard them before he saw them; their clanking metal march might as well have been a war drum, even with the biting tundra wind howling all around the complex. They came out from behind a warehouse, marching in perfect lock-step towards him with their gleaming rifles held in their cold metal arms. Adam just stood there, his sword held in his right hand and his left hand sliding up to unhook his sheath from his back. This wasn’t going to be a one-handed kind of fight, he could tell already. 

The Atlesian Knights marched into formation around him, forming a circle to surround him. Once they were all in place, they raised their rifles. Adam would have rolled his eyes if anybody would have seen it; this was  _ not _ how you apprehended a security threat, this was how you intimidated a protester. 

**“Surrender, or be subdued.”** Hearing a robotic voice yell that out from roughly sixty armed robotic security units at once probably would have been frightening to the average townsperson they were clearly meant to deal with, but Adam had tackled threats far greater than a few dozen toy soldiers. Including even bigger toy soldiers! Although this  _ was _ his first time going up against these things alone, so a little caution was probably warranted; with his lungs the way they were and the abdominal pains that flared up now and then, he wasn’t exactly in his prime to begin with. 

With a circle of armed opponents, Adam couldn’t reliably block and absorb the energy of the first shots like he could if this was indoors- getting surrounded and outnumbered was bad no matter how weak the enemy actually was, the law of numbers was about as ironclad as the law of inertia. Thing was, Adam knew he had a major advantage here and it was a pretty obvious one; the SDC wasn’t run by idiots, that was a large part of why they were able to keep pulling this shit. These AKs were never intended to actually handle a security threat; this was a mining town out in the tundra of Solitas, miles and miles away from the nearest other village and incapable of self sustainment. It was little more than a mine with a small town slapped onto it so the SDC didn’t have to pay for transport. The Dust it supplied was important but far from vital, meaning it wouldn’t be a target- the only reason to have these things was as a threat display to the workers to keep them in line. He’d been pretty sure to begin with but it wasn’t until the foreman shot him that he knew for a fact.

Those rounds were non-lethal. 

Euphrates left a glowing trail behind him as he sprinted towards the circle of AKs, and he managed to roundhouse kick one in the head so hard it knocked down two of its fellows before the first shot was fired. Adam jumped, slamming his boot into another AKs face-plate with a very satisfying crunch and launching off it to land behind the back of the circle. He whipped around and sliced one of the guns in half before kicking the falling piece into the robot that still held the rest of it. It was only then that they finally landed a shot on him, and Adam almost bit his tongue off. 

“Lightning dust,” he said between clenched teeth as he shook off the pain and darted towards the AK that had shot him. “Of course you wouldn’t play fair.” The next shot was blocked, his sword gleaming as it soaked up the energy. That glow drained away immediately as he used it to boost his aura, and then he swung Euphrates into its legs to send it toppling to the ground. The circle was breaking apart as they tried to surround him again, but he wasn’t going to let that happen again. 

The fight went on for at least ten more minutes as he dodged and ducked and blocked in between attacks; he took more shots, half of them sending a wave of sparking agony through his body and the rest of them uninfused but shot directly at his face- thankfully his new wooden mask was specially treated or else it would have splintered apart immediately. He could have cut through them all at once with a wave blast, but he was feeding every blocked shot into his aura to keep himself from passing out. His lungs were burning and his heart was pounding; in his condition, he simply couldn’t afford to use his semblance for anything other than mobility and healing. He’d only had the healing for the past few weeks but it was already one of the most valuable skills he possessed, dwarfing his years of combat experience almost immediately. 

As the last Atlesian Knight fell to the icy ground in two pieces, all Adam could do for a solid minute was pant. The adrenaline and the cold air helped to numb it a bit, but Adam could tell from the wetness to his wheezing that he’d severely overdone it. Hopefully it wasn’t blood. 

When he finally felt like he could walk without passing out, Adam slid Euphrates into its sheath with a click and swung it back into place on his back. He shook the last echoes of pain out of his limbs and did a quick little mental checklist; the foreman had been accosted, security dealt with, he doubted he had much to do in terms of sowing hatred for the SDC if that teller was any indication….. All he had left to do was make sure the townspeople understood that they had the power here, not the SDC, and that the SDC spent a lot of lien to try and make sure they never realized it. They had nothing left to lose, and so much to gain. 

The cold metal of the severed AK head seeped through Adam’s gloves as he picked it up. The sparks had died out but the frayed wires and cables still sent a pretty menacing message, and for bonus points he wrapped a bundle of wires dangling from the neck around his fingers and held it like that. The steps he took back to the office were calm, measured, betraying none of the pain in his chest or the exhaustion in his muscles. The secretary was still huddled under their desk, and Adam was actually a little concerned at this point but there wasn’t much he could do; he had a message to deliver to the foreman before he went and talked to the town. 

“Like I sai-” Adam started, but the words died in his throat as he walked into the office. The foreman was still slumped against the wall, blood indeed trickling from his broken nose. Unfortunately, it was dripping down across his cheek and onto his chest because the front of his chin was pressed against his adam’s apple; it was immediately clear that his neck had been hideously broken, and that his skull was completely detached from his spine- the only reason he wasn’t decapitated was because the damage had been done with blunt force and his skin and tendons were holding it there. His neck was already starting to look purple and swollen from massive internal bleeding. 

He’d been dead before Adam had even left the room, and Adam hadn’t noticed. 

“Fuck,” he muttered sharply. The AK head slammed noisily onto the floor and he turned around and marched back into the sitting room. He took one look at the secretary and he knew, just from the fear in the young man’s eyes, that he’d already run in to check on his boss and came back here to recover from that sight. There were a lot of things Adam could say; that he hadn’t meant too, that he really did have nothing to fear, that the foreman’s death wasn’t a bad thing, that he was sorry…. But none of them mattered. 

Adam tore his gaze away from the secretary’s terrified face and walked out the door. His mind churned as he re-evaluated things; odds were not good that he’d be able to get people to listen to him now, and on top of that the advice he had planned to give this town sort of hinged on the foreman not being dead. Hell, odds were good that if Adam didn’t run  _ right now, _ he’d be forced to answer for the foreman’s death. And that just wouldn’t end well, because he  _ clearly _ wasn’t capable of dealing with people non-lethally. But if he ran, what would happen to the town? Would the SDC chalk this up as a terrorist attack and raise security? Would they blame the town? This could just make things worse for the town as a whole, not better.

Then again…. The AKs implied that this town had a history of being unmanageable. With all of them in pieces and the foreman dead, it was possible that the townspeople would take advantage of this. Unfortunately that relied on these people already wanting to fight back, and sure that cashier had been plenty bitter but the secretary certainly hadn’t been.

The sun did nothing to warm his skin thanks to the still biting wind. Adam stood there, unblinking beneath his wooden mask, as he stared into the distance. 

He wasn’t here to make things better. Time and time again, it was made obvious that the only thing he could do was destroy. Adam Taurus was a killer, and nothing more. He’d come to Solitas with the express purpose of killing off the small number of people responsible for the corruption and oppression subjugating the world, and he  _ knew _ that he would have to leave the job of actually making things better to others. And yet, here he’d been trying to teach a town to unionize, he’d planned on making things better.

All he’d done was kill a man and wipe out an entire squadron of Atlesian Knights.  _ The facts are clear, and I ignored them. They’re even clearer now, and I need to stop looking the other way. I can’t help. _ Adam swallowed, and even through the howling tundra winds he could hear his leather gloves creak as he balled his hands into fists.  **_I can’t help._ **

He’d almost made it back to his parked bike, untouched in the town square, when the alarms finally sounded. Whether it was the secretary or someone else, he’d never know. He ran, hopping onto the bike in a fluid movement and yanking the thing into gear before he’d even settled. The once empty town square was filling up as people left their businesses and homes, drawn out by the shrieking emergency alarm coming from the complex. The hoverpad on his bike made a subtle but high pitched hum as he cranked it into high gear. As he tore out of town, the last thing he really saw was the face of the cashier he’d met when he first arrived. 

Adam chose to interpret their look of shock to mean they were surprised to see him flee. It was the only reason he could think of that didn’t make him want to bite through his own lips. 

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this was going to be a rather standard and obligatory depiction of inspiring a worker's rights uprising, but uh. Adam happened, and honestly I'm really glad he did because this is way better thematically than what I'd originally planned.


End file.
